Hi,

To start with, may I say that you have developed a first class product here, I realise you're in the last stages of the initial release, but this is a truly great tool for VFR fliers everywhere. It already has lots to offer versus the competition, but with time it will blow them away. Just need to get some approved/easy to implement hardware recommendations and install guides (e.g. I'm a helicopter pilot, so I'm looking for something that is thin/light enough to mount onto a knee board, yet is big enough say 5-7 inches to be quickly/easily visible).

Feature requests:

1. Flying the Robinson R44 helicopter and planning weight and balance I noticed that you only have weights/arms that act on the Long axis...  I don't know about fixed wing, but in helicopters it is also important to calculate the Lat weights/arms also! Is it possible for the Aircraft Manager and the Weight and Balance windows to accommodate this?

2. When entering weights into the Weight and Balance window, it would be good if the Fuel value would be automatically entered based on the selection from the Fuel window... otherwise one has to manually convert the weight of the fuel (that has been calculated automatically in the Fuel window) and then enter it manually. Just a simple time saving feature, but very useful. In the Aircraft Manager one could select the Loading Point (or points, see #3) that correlates to the Fuel calculation window?

3. This may make #2 more complicated, many aircraft have multiple fuel tanks, with different lever arms (and of course different weights depending on how they are filled). It would be really good to have SkyDemon have configurable fuel tanks (including min/max values).

Again, excellent product!

1. I like the idea. I'll speak to a heli pilot next time I see one and learn more about this.

2. SkyDemon has always done this. Fuel loading point is automatically filled in as the fuel plan changes. This only happens if the loading point is called "fuel" (which it is in the default aircraft).

3. I'd like to support aircraft with multiple fuel tanks but this is something planned for a future version. We have to decide how to automatically distribute the fuel, obviously.

Thanks for the quick replies...

1. I'm a PPL helicopter pilot if that helps... and I'm in Wiltshire most weeks... you're at Henstridge right?

2. Ah... I renamed the default "Fuel" to "Main Fuel" (as I had added an "Aux Fuel") loading point. Once I renamed it back to "Fuel" it worked fine.

3. Okay, I guess it would mean multiple sliders in the Fuel window to individually fill/unfill them I guess.

Thanks, and good luck with 1.0 release!

Yeah I can be around at Henstridge or Compton Abbas at short notice. If you contact me via the link at the bottom of the homepage we'll sort something out.

Tim, the tanks in the R44 are fed gravitationally, and will self level between them given enough time, so if you find out what level the main tank is at when the aux tank reads empty you could write a distribution algorithm based on relative volume.

Complicated for one aircraft and ultimately not the goal of a generic system i guess, just a suggestion.



I think you have done a really fantastic job on the software. I particularly like the way it plots out the notams. I can't seem to work out whether it auto plots royal flights, if it does, brilliant, if not, would this be possible?



On mass and balance would it also be able to plot an end of trip mark and a fuel empty mark on the graph? Would really apprecite it.



Andrew

Assuming the royal flight is covered by a NOTAM, which it should be, clicking on the NOTAM in the briefing window will plot all the points mentioned in the NOTAM. For things like Red Arrows notifications, this is pretty useful.

I would indeed like to plot those points on the W&B graph and it's something we hope to get done for the next release of the software. Thanks for the great feedback.

Hi,



I would also like to get longitudinal and lateral W&B for helicopter (Hughes C296).



Regards,

-Mika